Mr. Matt Buttery:

Essentially I think the Deputy asked some similar questions. The key things for us are, as early as possible, all parents need access to services such as these. They do not have to take them up. To clarify, the reach is huge.

In the midlands here, co-funded by Atlantic Philanthropies, we did a population of coached parenting using Triple P and I will be happy to send a summary of this on to the committee. In ten years, that small team in the midlands, led largely by six practitioners in the HSE but working with Barnardos, the libraries and the wider sector, reached 36,000 parents, who went through an evidence-based parenting programme. They achieved between 25% to 30% population reach. If that is compared to Australia, one can see how impressive that is. What is very significant about that roll-out is that one sees benefits for parents who attend, but one is also able to see evidence of a ripple effect of benefits with parents and children who did not attend. The clue is what I talked about with Pamela, the parent I hoped could attend today, and what she said to her sister the other day about the chocolate bar. We found that two thirds of those parents who had not attended the public health campaign we had done on positive parenting had not even heard of Triple P, but of that group two thirds said that they had read the workbook or had been given tips or advice by friends who had attended.

This is not about reaching all parents but is about normalising, de-stigmatising access and recognising that we do not parent in isolation but in community. We will either do what our parents did or we will not do what they did. This is the usual binary choice upon which most of us make these decisions if we are fortunate enough to be parents. We will then ask our friends. We do not always need to get to you if we can get to your friends in order to see an impact and outcome.

I would slightly deviate from what Ms Ní Raghallaigh has said in terms of my ask, in particular in respect of the HSE and the CDNTs. I do not believe we should train everybody as that could be a bit of a waste of money. By all means we should get them to come on the programme so that they can see it in action. Perhaps they may come as parents or observers, or maybe they will get some insight because someone delivers them a briefing session, but we should have very thoughtful implementation of these problems with the CDNTs to work out who are the right staff and who has the capacity to deliver this programme, to ascertain whether there is supervision and support in place for them to deliver it, and to select those people to train them. That does not mean we cannot give access to some of the stuff but we really need that mandate and accountability from the CDNTs.

This is about workforce development but is also about practitioner time. What are practitioners doing with their time and what could they be doing? These interventions work. If one could spend a few hours with a parent doing this intervention, one is fairly much guaranteed that one is going to get positive outcomes. Looking at the evidence, one might get significant outcomes. How can we think about practitioner time and upskilling the workforce to do that?

On the question about Australia, the roll-out was not sustained, as I understand it. Many of the practitioners continued to deliver where they could but there were challenges around what was going on. The Australian Federal Government in the past year has funded our Triple P online system of programmes for any parent across the entire country. By "online", I mean it is self-directed by parents. I am not talking here about what Mr. McSweeney is doing, which I would call virtual. All of our programmes can be delivered virtually by Zoom or Teams. What I mean is that a parent could access the programme, if they wanted to, in a self-directed delivery format. For that, we have eight randomised control trials underpinning its efficacy. One says that it is non-inferior to face-to-face delivery. That does not mean it is right for everybody. It is not the magic bullet, but in respect of accessibility and the question asked by Deputy Ellis about which one is right; none of them are right but we need to give choice and access.

Later this year we will be launching Stepping Stones Triple P online as a self-directed online version with equivalent strength in evidence to the nine-week group and the ten-week one-to-one programme. These are the other things which we could be doing in thinking about making online programmes available across the country. Thoughtful implementation by the CDNTs is my key ask.